This past week, I boarded a plane to Texas for my first two speaking engagements since launching this new chapter of my life. I’ll admit something: stepping out as a speaker has not come naturally to me. For years, I have taught around tables, in classrooms, in my own community, and in spaces that felt familiar and safe. Going out into the world and sharing my story, my actual story, is different. It requires a vulnerability that I have wrestled with, because my story isn’t neat. It includes heartbreak, loss, fear, uncertainty, starting over, and seasons when I genuinely could not see what the next chapter would look like.
But lately, something has been gnawing at me. I began to feel that perhaps I don’t have the right to keep one of the greatest gifts G-d has given me to myself: the ability to feel Him closely. Through some of the most difficult years of my life, I developed a relationship with G-d that became incredibly real to me. Not theoretical, and not something reserved for prayer, Shabbat, or holidays, but a living, breathing relationship that comes with me into my kitchen, my car, my work, my parenting, my disappointments, my fears, and my joys.
I talk to Him. Out loud. I tell Him when I’m scared and when I’m frustrated. I thank Him when something tiny works out. I ask Him to help me find things. I cry to Him when something hurts, and I share my joy with Him when life feels abundant and beautiful. I bring Him into the ordinary details of my day. That relationship has changed everything. It doesn’t mean difficult things don’t happen; it means I experience them differently because I know I am not walking through them alone.
That is ultimately why I finally said yes to speaking. Not because I have a perfect story to tell, but because if sharing my very imperfect one can help another person discover what life can feel like when G-d becomes real and personal, then perhaps the vulnerability is worth it.
Plano: The Beauty in the Cracks
Somehow, my very first speaking engagement could not have been more fitting. In Plano, Texas, I joined a beautiful Chabad community run by Rivkie Block for a pre–High Holiday evening centered around the Japanese art of kintsugi. Kintsugi is the centuries-old art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and highlighting the repaired cracks with gold. Rather than trying to disguise the places where the vessel shattered, the cracks become part of its beauty. The gold seems to say: This broke here. This happened. This is part of its story. And somehow, the repaired vessel becomes not merely whole again, but uniquely beautiful because of where it was broken.
Standing there and sharing my story, I couldn’t help but think: This is my life. There was a time when I felt shattered into pieces. There were chapters I never would have chosen and pain I never imagined I would have to walk through. There were moments when rebuilding didn’t mean putting my old life back together. It meant creating something entirely new, one tiny piece at a time.
For a long time, I think we can believe that healing means getting back to who we were before. I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t want to erase my cracks or pretend they never happened. Today, thank G-d, I can wear them proudly. Those cracks hold my resilience and my faith. They hold the nights I cried and the mornings I got up anyway. They hold the courage I didn’t know I had and every moment I chose to trust when I couldn’t see what was coming next.
The journey was long. It was painful. It was filled with challenges I never would have requested. And yet, I can look at my life today and say with tremendous gratitude that the journey shaped me into a person I could not have dreamed of becoming. I am living and experiencing blessings today that at one point I could not even have imagined for myself. The cracks are still part of me, but instead of seeing them as something to hide, I can recognize how much of who I am today was formed within them.
Each woman had the opportunity to create her own kintsugi bowl, and I loved watching them come together. No two were alike. Every break was different, every gold line traveled its own path, and every finished piece was completely unique. It felt like such a beautiful reflection of our own lives. Our cracks don’t disqualify us from being beautiful. Sometimes they are precisely where our deepest beauty lives.
Houston: Building a Relationship With G-d
From Plano, I traveled to Houston, where my beautiful niece Tzippe Nathenson hosted me for an evening with an incredible group of young Jewish women gathering just before Yom Kippur. This was a completely different kind of evening, but in many ways it was the other half of the same story. We talked about what it means to build a real, personal, authentic relationship with G-d and how that relationship can transform the way we experience our everyday lives.
Every meaningful relationship requires investment. We make time for the people we love. We communicate, share, listen, and show up. Our relationship with G-d requires nurturing too. I shared what it has meant in my own life to stop thinking of G-d as Someone I connect with only through formal prayer or religious moments and instead invite Him into everything. Talk to Him. Tell Him what you need and what you’re worried about. Tell Him what made you happy today. Thank Him for the tiny things that worked out, and cry to Him about the things that hurt. Nothing is too insignificant, and nothing is too enormous.
When that relationship becomes real, it changes the way you experience your life. It changes how you see challenges and how you experience uncertainty. It changes the way you receive blessings and the way you walk into the unknown. It doesn’t guarantee that life will unfold according to our plans. What it does give us is the deep awareness that whatever unfolds, we are never navigating it alone.
As I reflected on these two very different evenings in Texas, I realized how deeply connected they really were. In Plano, we talked about the cracks. In Houston, we talked about the One who is with us inside them. One evening was about rebuilding the vessel; the other was about the relationship that gives us the courage to keep rebuilding.
Somewhere between Plano and Houston, I understood a little more clearly why I am stepping outside my comfortable little hometown tables and doing something that still feels vulnerable and new. I don’t want simply to tell my story. I want to use my story to help someone else feel G-d in theirs. If one woman walks away believing that her broken pieces can become something beautiful, if one person begins talking to G-d in the car on the way home, or if someone going through a dark chapter begins to wonder whether this might be a chapter rather than the ending, then every vulnerable moment is worth it.
My cracks are part of my story. Today, I get to wear them in gold, and I am profoundly grateful for every opportunity to share what I learned while putting the pieces back together.